3S Artspace Proposal

Exhibition Description

the american wait is a found footage video installation that employs the notion of waiting and lines as a means to explore the relationship between the institutional regulation of the Black body, commodified exchanges, cultural production and labor in the United States. Throughout history, the presence of Blackness has played a pivotal role in shaping global economies and institutions. Be it a queue, a dance line, or a funeral procession, the line serves as a means of organization, production, streamlining, giving, receiving, aesthetics, viewing and exhibiting, as well as consumption and movement. Thus, while it serves as a means of control and regulation, it also reveals underlying relationships between and within individuals, groups, the dominant and minority.

The installation is comprised of dozens of videos of various lengths that have been sourced through social media. They play asynchronously at the same time, with audio included, each in their own time and continues on a loop. Below is a short excerpt of an iterative draft form.

Audiences enter a dark space in which they are facing the video as it is projected on a black wall in front of them. The projection fills the entire wall surface, and the individual videos appear scattered across the surface. Because the space is blacked out, it appears as though the videos are separate from one another, as the wall would appear to black.

Were additional work to supplement this piece, I would offer a simple audio component that I entitled black and blue. black and blue is a collection of spoken word poetry that conceptually ties into the ideas of the american wait. This work is performed by me on a set of tape recorders and plays on loop continuously, also asynchronously. The documentation included is one example of this piece in conjunction with a performative installation but provides one example of how it may be exhibited.